VPN Clients Not Allowed On Residential Service

wayn3 writes "ComputerWorld reports here that two of the major cable companies have language in their terms of service that VPN clients are forbidden for "residential" class, forcing clients on their "business" offering which is at twice or more times the cost of residential service. Has any been bit by this, and do those companies consider SSH a VPN client? This would stop me from telecommuting since my company would not be able to afford the business service."

Comments

What's wrong with this?

[viking099]

I mean, you're using the connection for business purposes, you should be willing to pay for that. If your company can't afford it, then tough. It's not rocket science. Not only that, if you require 24-7 availability of your systems, you can always install a modem or two and connect that way.
If you require internet access for work, then you get a work account. If you require it for home, then it's a home account.
Hell, if you work from home, get the damn work account, then deduct the cost from your income taxes.

Re:What's wrong with this?

[jamesoden]

Wrong. Wrong Wrong. When you sign up with an ISP, they are providing general purpose internet connectivity. When you buy a business account, you are buying that and:

1) Better service (i.e. technical support).
2) Perhaps a static IP address.
3) Web hosting, email hosting for multiple
accounts.
4) Some other item that adds value to the service
thus justifying the added cost to you.

Also, business class service is meant for situations where more bandwidth needs to be allocated for your use (such as with a web server that gets many hits).

Differentiating your servous based on what applications you use, if the application does not use any more bandwidth that any other regular users use, is just unacceptable.

I personnaly do have a business account, but that was because I was willing to pay for a static IP.

Re:What's wrong with this?

[slakdrgn]

Granted for business purposes I can kinda see the reason (tho dun get me wrong I use VPN-1 for work a lot..) but what about the techie's who use vpn-1 at home.. ie.. I vpn into my friends network at his house all the time, sometimes to remote admin to the gaming server, when it decides to crash, or play 'round with some other things in the network.. this definatly is *NOT* business related.. and a lot of the reason he has it setup is for learning (certifications)..

Granted not a lot of people use vpn as personal, but what about the people that do? sometimes there are non-business related things u can use vpn for.. should they be penalized too?

~slak

Re:What's wrong with this?

[naChoZ]

Well said.

I work for one of these cm isp's. When a customer pays the business rate here they DO get better QOS, ability to call our business help desk (which staffs local people who are much sharper folks than the retards at the nation helpdesk for residential customers). They also get access to our other services, static ip, etc. We have even higher levels of service where your modem is basically watched ALL the time and if your modem goes down, there's someone on it before you can even pick up the phone, 24/7.

I know for a fact that probably 80% of the cm isp's out there aren't like us, but those of us who *are* customer satisfaction oriented cringe when we get lumped in with the ones who don't give a damn...

Re:What's wrong with this?

[bobKali]

Ok, first off they're selling me the bandwidth, and as far as I can see I'm completely within my rights to use as much of it as I like - that's what I'm paying for after all. It's none of my business if their business model depends on the majority of their customers not using all the bandwidth they're paying for.
Second, the network isn't going to give me any more bandwidth than I'm paying for, so it shouldn't matter what I'm doing with the bandwidth that I have.
Now, as far as the extras that a business account provides:

Tech support - don't need it, and they don't support Linux anyway.

Static IP address - the residential service gives me that anyway - and even if it didn't, I would be somewhat inconvenienced, but it's not something I care about.

Web hosting, email hosting, etc... - don't need it, don't want it.

other value added services - don't need them, don't want them, wouldn't use them.

So I have absolutely no use for the business service and I physically cannot use more bandwidth than their network will give me (which is what I'm paying for) so I don't see any reason for them to get all pissy about what kind of packets I'm sending over the bandwidth that I pay for.
Besides, I use Cox and I seriously doubt that they have the technical knowhow to navigate themselves out of a wet paper bag, much less figure out what applications I'm running on my computer at home.

Re:What's wrong with this?

[Trekologer]

I couldn't have said it better myself.

I would go further and get your local or state consumer protection and/or public utility board involved.

Why? The cable companies have been advertising how you can have "always on" "faster than dial-up" internet connections. No where in those ads do they say that the price offered is only for "casual surfing" or anything like that. Plain and simple, the cable companies are engaging in "bait and switch"... advertising one service then saying "Hey, that's not really for you. You want this much more expensive service."

Or, if you just want to be sly, just use another port than the usual VPN one (80, 21, etc).

How to classify a VPN?

[adadun]

The obvious question is "what classifies as a VPN?" A VPN is a Virtual Private Network which usually is constructed using a secure IP layer such as IPsec. While it is easy to scan for IPsec usage (it has it's own protocol number - even as TCP and UDP has), it is much harder to scan for other types of VPN solutions.

Even encrypted HTTP, HTTPS, can be used to build a VPN-similar type of thing (think "VNC"). Since HTTPS is used to encrypt on-line banking traffic, e-commerce sites and such, they cannot just stop everyone from using HTTPS.

Furthermore, since the data (by definition) is encrypted, it is impossible to peek at the data to determine if a data stream is "a VPN" or just some other HTTPS transfer.

The conlusion is that they will have huge problems trying to enforce this.

What if AT&T upped your phone bill?

[Demerara]

Girard said cable business-class service "is not any better than residential, yet they charge you more."

Imagine your phone company doubling your bill because they analysed your calls and decided you made a call to the office!!

I buy bandwidth. What I do with the bandwidth is nobody's business (obvious exceptions included..)

Re:What if AT&T upped your phone bill?

[Rogerborg]

• I buy bandwidth.

Well (assuming you're with a cableco), that's not at all true. You contribute to paying for the overall bandwidth usage.

The issue here is that what cableco's want to do is charge by the byte, but they know that they need to market their product as flat rate to attract the mythical "average user" who does nothing but suck pay-per-view content from the cableco's portal (no, idiots, that's a cable TV customer, you already own that market).

So what they are doing (in the UK as well, where I am based) is writing clauses into the AUP's that are designed to prohibit the sort of things that high bandwidth users are likely to do, without actually mentioning bandwidth per se. The aim isn't primarily to stop those activities, it's to limit bandwidth usage either directly (by not bringing in traffic to servers) or indirectly (by punting the high usage customers).

The UK basically has three broadband providers, DSL from the monopoly telco, and cable modems from two cableco's. And that's it. The telco acts exactly like the cableco's highlighted here; abusive, obstructive, restrictive, incompetent and internally muddled. It's impossible to get a straight answer out of them on policies.

In contrast, the two UK cableco's are (currently) behaving strangely honestly. One of the two, NTL, brought in a blanket ban on all servers. In the outcry that followed, they reversed this, and instead made their policy clear; it's all about bandwidth (as above). They acknowledged that they would only pursue those customers who generated an unfair amount of external traffic, like were running a server that was constantly attracting more traffic than their cable could cope with, leaving packets to expire alone and unloved throughout the network. The other UK cableco, Telewest, recently sent out a huge email about their technical policies. It named names internally, it gave usage numbers, server details, it basically treated the customers as intelligent, informed people, and solicited feedback. "Tell us how you want us to develop your network," they said, and I think they meant it. They understand that a prerequisite to having customers is to have happy customers who aren't just sitting fuming and waiting for their contracts to expire. There will probably be some dissenting followups here, and it's certainly the case that NTL and Telewest do screw over some customers, but they are getting better.

So my point is that there are different ways of doing things. Marketing droids can be invited to consider that it's OK to talk about bandwidth usage upfront, as long as you make it clear that you're only concerned with extreme cases and not 95% of Joe Users. Technical guys can be made to realise that if you involve your customers and don't lie to them or dissemble, they will be more understanding when you have problems. Lawyers can be instructed to stick to the important issues when writing AUP's, and not to create sleepless nights for low usage customers who just want to set up secure remote access to their boxen.

Honesty, clarity. It's all we ask for, really. Target the users that are costing you money, do it directly, and don't make vague threats that will just piss off the 95% of low usage customers that you rely on to generate money.

Is that so hard to understand? NTL and Telewest in the UK get it.

where does it stop?

[CodeMonky]

What if I'm not using a VPN but just doing research on the web for work? Are the cable companies gonna stipulate that you can't do anything for a business from home, even browsing the web?

Re:where does it stop?

[rknop]

What if I'm not using a VPN but just doing research on the web for work? Are the cable companies gonna stipulate that you can't do anything for a business from home, even browsing the web?

All that you're supposed to be doing with it is downloading "digital content" and associated advertisements from major media companies. You're a home user, right? That means that you aren't supposed to be able to think for yourself or want to do anything creative or interesting with your computer and your internet connection. Remember, it's a cable modem. That means you're supposed to use it like cable TV. You want to pretend that you're a thinking individual, well, in this country, you gotta pay extra for that, because that's not what the economy needs of its citizens.

-Rob

Argument from personal incredulity is a fallacy

[ManualCrank Angst]

"I can't really see a use for a VPN besides connecting widely distributed corporate offices and internal networks, which is most certainly deserving of business-class rates."

I can. I have family in the area, some with broadband of various kinds. If we shared files more (which will probably happen in the future), it would be nice if we could be hooked up on a VPN so we could just drag and drop to various locations, rather than emailing. It would be simpler and it would take up less bandwidth (one copy vs one upload + one download).

Same old, same old.

[mrsam]

As long as people are complacent and accept these kinds of bully tactics from their providers, they really have no standing to complain about it later. Don't like the fact that your cable company wants to be your net.babysitter, and tell you what you can or can't do on the Internet?

Well, rewarding this kind of arrogant big-brother attitude by giving them even MORE money for business-class service is certainly going to encourage a change for the better, wouldn't it? Or, perhaps, you should tell them to shove their port filters, and their DHCP garbage, up their network interface, and switch to someone else who does indeed provides real internet connectivity.

People really need to vote with their feet, and stop agreeing to put on their Internet provider's straightjackets. There are ISPs who will sell you a residential class DSL service, with a static IP address, and let you run servers. That's real Internet connectivity.

Actually, that analogy is relevant...

[chrome koran]

While the phone company does not eavesdrop on you to see if you are making business calls, they do charge a much higher rate (nearly double) for business service than they do for residential service. (Call your telco and check.) However, since they don't really check, hundreds of thousands of tele-commuters have residential phone lines that are being used for business purposes almost exclusively.

Here's the point: Business usage (phone, cable, whatever) CAN be more costly to the provider because these users will scream louder and demand quicker restoration of service when something goes wrong (line failure due to snowstorm, flooding, you name it). They also threaten to sue for lost business revenues due to the company's failure to restore said service in what they think is a timely manner. Residential customers don't bring that baggage.

So, they don't really care if you USE the line for business, because you won't be able to file suit as in the case above -- according to the TOS you weren't supposed to be using it for that purpose anyway. BUT, if you want them to treat your service as an essential component of running your business, you have to pay business rates...which is not wholly unfair IMHO.

Re:Actually, that analogy is relevant...

[Fnkmaster]

This is reasonable - I am willing to pay a graded amount based on different guaranteed uptime and service levels from my ISP/ILEC/CLEC/CableCo for my internet access. Just spell it out to me, stop treating me like a fucking kid, and then KEEP your goddamned guarantees. Even my company, which pays through the rectum for real T1 service doesn't really get the service level or uptime we were promised (and our silly folks signed a deal that basically gives us minimal compensation for excess downtime).

If I have more downtime in a month than I am guaranteed, I expect the entire month for free. This should be at least a two or three sigma event, so it shouldn't be too costly for the involved companies to give me this.

Then give me an honest deal that says "Residential Service == guaranteed 98% uptime", "Business Service == guaranteed 99.95% uptime". Real business users WILL pay for the guaranteed 99.95% uptime, and home users, even those who casually use VPNs to transfer files to and fro from servers at work, or to log into some machines at work to do some compiles or testing, will probably stick with residential (unless they telecommute exclusive and their company needs them to be guaranteed available all the time).

Frankly, there's no excuse for anything else, and if residential service can't even be maintained at that sort of guaranteed service level, the provider doesn't deserve to stay in that business anyway (and I don't want to sign up with them).

Actually, It's Worse Than That

[StormyMonday]

I invesigated Comcast cable a while back, as I'm out of range for DSL. Their terms of service were, in a word, unacceptable.

• No VPN. I suspect that there would be problems with the dynamic IP address anyway.
• Nothing that remotely resembles a server is allowed.
• No "business usage" of any kind. It's worded so that it applies to checking office mail from home.
• They have the usual clause "we reserve the right to change the Terms of Service at any time, in any way, with no notice."
• (The real kicker) They explicitly claim ownership of all intellectual property that you generate and that passes through their network.

I suspect that you could get away with practically anything as long as nobody complained and you didn't generate too much traffic.

Oh, as to their "business solution"? DSL. Not an option. Near as I can tell, there is no such thing as "business class cable" Internet.

No high-speed internet for me. Sigh.

Re:Actually, It's Worse Than That

[bluGill]

(The real kicker) They explicitly claim ownership of all intellectual property that you generate and that passes through their network.

This is good. Now generate some illegal content (slander, or copyright violations), and then use as your defense "The cable company (which has deeper pockets) owns that content, so sue them not me.

Don't you get it yet?

[FacePlant]

You aren't supposed to do anything on your cable modem connection except surf the web, read email, and be really impressed at how much faster than 56k it is.

They've all but said that outright. They don't sell bandwidth. They sell a high speed web surfing experience.

This should no longer surprise anybody here. Let's get over it.

Assuming you have a choice

[brassrat77]

The choice is not using a different company. The decision is use broadband from THE company servicing your community under THEIR terms or revert to dial-up service.

*IF* you're lucky, you can "choose" between the monopoly cable company's service and the monopoly phone company's service. If you are REALLY lucky, you can get DSL from a CLEC or COVAD reseller. If you are insanely fortunate, you can get wireless service or your buddy next door has a T-1 you can tap into.

I live a few miles from AOL, mci/worldcom/uunet, and many other MAJOR data centers. Yet *my* choices are: Cable modem, overpriced IDSL service, ISDN, or modem. People living in spitting distance of the main MCI center can't even get my limited selection.

There is no choice, the broadband providers are well aware of that fact, and they are determined to keep it that way.

Re:Your company can't afford it?

[thesolo]

Let me get this straight, the company pays you enough that you can in turn pay $X for the service but they "can't afford" to additionally pay $X themselves (to make up the difference to the $2X price of business-class)? BS. Either you are exaggerating or the company is lying to you--they just don't want to pay for it.

I work for a large (3000+ people) company in the Philadelphia region. The company currently supports telecommuting with broadband through VPN. Currently, they pay $39.95 per month for connectivity, plus $30 per month for outsourced broadband routers/firewalls. (The latter part I think is stupid, but I digress.) So for each person telecommuting, they pay roughly $70 per month

Now, increase that highspeed access from $39.95 to $95.00, and they would have to pay roughly $125 per month per person. If only 300 out of the 3000 people here telecommute, that's a cost of $37,500 a month, or $450,000 a year just for broadband users. At the previous price, it would be roughly $252,000 per year. Almost 200k more. That's a lot of money to just "find" in your budget. So what happens? Comcast loses money because my company suspends all high-speed telecommuting. So now instead of getting their extra 200k a year, they get nothing, and the people who benefited from telecommuting no longer can.

You know, if Comcast wanted all these people/companies to shell out $50 more per month, the LEAST they could do is remove that 128kbps upstream cap they enforce for business accounts. Its really annoying to transfer large files to work or VPN to a server when you can't send out over 15K/sec, peak.

Re:Telecommuting IS a Business activity...

[lythander]

The problem here is that most people who use VPNs to connect to their workplace aren't telecommuters, but people who need a file or to check mail or something simple on an infrequent basis. Relatively few people truly telecommute (i.e. work from home most or all of the time). This more expensive business use, as well as actually running a business (servers, whatever) should cost more. But it seems unfair for someone to have to shell out the extra dough so they can check their mail from home.

Obviously there are secure ways besides VPNs to implement this functionality, and eventually I think we'll see a move towards these. The question remains how will the enforce this prohibition? And if it's allowed on business connections, does that mean they'll support it, too?

See, the real issue here isn't "no you can't do that here," but that certain types of users call with certain kinds of questions, and this allows those answering the questions to segregate the questions so the right people can answer them. IP/SEC traffic requires certain very specific protocols and ports to be opened which may not normally be open on a standard ISP network. Most legacy hardware, and much current hardware doesn't support IP/SEC, so it cannot work. Your cable modem/router probably doesn't, unless it's high end or very new.

By prohibiting this activity on their "home" networks, they need not burn cycles explaining why "you can't do that, it just won't work," while really saying "our hardware can't handle it." The latter unfairly casts a negative shadow on an ISP who simply didn't design their network to handle this traffic, and perhaps doesn't see that as being cost effective to do.

So this is another attempt to cover themselves for not providing any sort of support for VPN, including enabling the funcationality on their hardware. It's like their not supporting more than one machine in your house, or not supporting linux on their cable network. It would cost them way more to do it right than it's worth. They aren't doing anything wrong, though they're not doing anyone any favors, either. They aren't likely to tell you to stop, just not to ask for help. IP/SEC may never work on these networks, but other VPN-like items will probably fly under the radar.

Sue them under Robinson-Patman?

[aozilla]

A seller charging competing buyers different prices for the same "commodity" or discriminating in the provision of "allowances" -- compensation for advertising and other services -- may be violating the Robinson-Patman Act. This kind of price discrimination may hurt competition by giving favored customers an edge in the market that has nothing to do with the superior efficiency of those customers. However, price discriminations generally are lawful, particularly if they reflect the different costs of dealing with different buyers or result from a seller?s attempts to meet a competitor?s prices or services.

http://www.ftc.gov/bc/compguide/discrim.htm

I have comcast, I dont see this in the TOS

[LordKronos]

I have comcast, and I dont see this written anywhere in the TOS, and Ive been looking at them for a while. I'm reading them here, and I see nothing about VPNs or that I interpret as VPN usage.

Ive been looking at these TOS for a while, becuase a whole lot of crap has been going on with comcast lately. Here are some of the email I've recieved from them lately.

They are changing mail services. This means my address changes from user@mediaone.net to user@comcast.com (or comcast.net, cant remember). No prob, EXCEPT the new addres becomes active Dec 29th, old address is deactive Dec 31s. This means we have 3 days to make the udate to all our online accounts, subscriptions, mailing list, etc. and what 3 days do we get? Sat, Sun, New Years Eve. If I have a problem making this update for one of my accounts, good luck finding someone to help, since most companies will be closed these 3 days.

Furthermore, until mid Jan, we will only have 1 comcast email address. What about those of us now that have 2 or 3 address. We only have 1 until mid Jan. I have an email, my wife has an email, some families have kids with emails. I guess someone in the household get left out in the cold for half a month (luckily for me/my wife, I've already transitioned to my own personal domain with email, so its not an issue for me, but Im sure it is for MANY, MANY people). They wont get email in that time, and what happens when they try to switch over one of their accounts in mid jan, and the system tells them "to confirm your update, we have send an email to your previous address. Please click the link in that email to complete your update".

What else have they told me lately...oh yeah. They send me an email all about how some home pages are going to change, something really minor. Then, burried 5 paragraphs down, they mention that, by the way, there will also be a new acceptable use policy effective Jan 1st, 2002 which "includes new information on several subjects, including use of bandwidth". Are they going to charge us for excessive downloads or uploads? I tried to look up these changes at the URL I posted above, but I see nothing about bandwidth. It says what I can/cant do, but nothing about how much of it I can do. Im puzzled. Are they getting worried about wireless neighborhood area networks?

What else...oh yeah. Im getting a new modem mailed to me that I have to hook up by end of year. According to them "This new modem will prepare your computer for upcoming Comcast High Speed Internet product enhancements including improved reliability and new features". I talked with some people, and came up with rumors that they are decreasing our upload speed to 128Kbit. I currently get 250Kbit up, and I know people that get almost 400Kbit up. I looked on their site, and nowhere do they mention upload speeds anymore, except on one pricing chart, they list the serivice as "1.5/128K" (1.5Mbit down/128Kbit up). Im afraid this new modem is their attempt to "upgrade" my upload speeds.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot about the letter I got through postal mail last week...price goes up $5.

YEAH COMCAST!!!!!!

Re:@home has that in its AUP but...

[baptiste]

Why would they do this? Because business accounts use more bandwidth on average.

Bull. Show me stats - real stats that back this up. Residential users actually use more bandwidth than a business user @ home ever would. Gnutella, Browsing heavy graphical sites, etc. Most business users use VPN to check .... email. Maybe access a file server but how many files will they work on at once?

This is typical telco mindset being applied by cable companies - jack up business rates for the same service you provide to homes since you lose money on residential service. Then try to get as many folks on business lines as possible. Same thing happened with dial up - telcos wanted us to have business lines for hoem dialup users into our corporate networks - and we did - why? The IT managers wanted 'business class' support on these lines to get problems fixed faster - like it was gonna shut the company down if manager X couldn't dial in from home on his 2nd phone line and the telco hadn't committed to having it fixed by X hours. (um - what about the first)

I chuckle at all the ISP issues out there - just like banks - the bigger monoliths screw you while you get GREAT service and such from smaller ones. My ISP is a mom/pop phone company that got bought by another company that specialized in running mom/pops. We have excellent service (DSL), great rates, and they are pretty laid back about how you use it (no blocks - not even port 25, etc)

What's wrong? Business class doesn't exist.

[fizbin]

What little chance I had of sympathizing with the "no business use" restrictions of residential service vanished once I realized that residential service is ALL there is.

The places that talk about the restrictions on residential service seem to imply that just by paying more, one can sign up for a "business class" service that is essentially the same as residential service but without those restrictions.

Unfortunately, that's not the case. Business class service (except briefly for some of the areas served by Cox cable) over cable lines does not exist. It is a strawman that cable ISPs use to pretend that their restrictions on "business" use are somehow rational. This is a re-occuring thread in various @Home newgroups.

Hopefully having an article in ComputerWorld will produce more explicit explanation from cable ISPs about what exactly they mean by business use.

Consider that a common Comcast@Home commercial shows someone auditioning for an acting job halfway across the country through an @Home webcast. If that's not allowed, I smell a bait-and-switch lawsuit.

A View from the Other Side

[Witchblade]

Having briefly worked as tech support for @Home, allow me to show a brief glimpse of why providers may want to do this.

An inordinate amount of cable internet support calls are VPN related. If you thought that clueless people having trouble connecting to their AOL email was a tech support nightmare, you've not seen anything until you get someone unable to connect to a VPN. A typical call would go like: "Dammit, why can't I get online!" After asking a few questions and running some tests it's made clear that the connection is fine, and they're able to connect through their desktop machine, just not their laptop. "Okay," I'd say, "It's probably just an error in the settings somewhere." I'd then proceed to describe how to open up the relevant controls in NT4 (it was always NT4...) "What? Are you kidding?!" they'd scream "This is my companies laptop and we're not allowed to touch anything on it!!!!!" "That's a problem, then," I'd say. "You'll have to have your sys admin check the settings for you then." "You're fucking kidding me! I'm in Redmond, WA and the company is in Denver! I work from home!"

The story was always the same: dumbass company gives employess laptops so they can work from home, and told them they had to get a broadband internet service, but didn't configure the machines for even DHCP or give the employees the admin passwords to configure things. You'd get that call about 20 times a day.

I'm so fucking glad I'm back in research. :)

Re:Telecommuting IS a Business activity...

[roystgnr]

Oh, goody, someone just finished reading Atlas Shrugged...

If you don't like the way Company A sells their bandwidth, don't purchase from Company A.

How about, if I don't like the way Company A sells their product, I rescind the government granted right-of-way that allowed Company A to dig up countless miles of public and private property to bring their product to me?

Fair is a socialist concept.

So is eminent domain, but without it we wouldn't have any cables (or utilities) reaching our homes at all. If we're already granting corporate monopolies based on one socialist theory, why stop there?